nMP/new Mac Pro/Mac Pro 6,1 Reviews [MERGED]

[ddarko]

Noisy? That would be the first "hands on" to say the nMP is noisy. And expensive compared to what, exactly?

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Ha, over 1,100 comments in that post.

The article doesn't say it's noisy, in fact, one section is titled "erstaunlich leise" which means "amazingly quiet."

 

[Gav Mack]

The article doesn't say it's noisy, in fact, one section is titled "erstaunlich leise" which means "amazingly quiet."

Sone I hate to measure noise - 38-55dba in my language which equals "bloody quiet for doing all that"

 

[snapdragonx]

How many effects can FCPX playback on RED 4K media without frame dropping?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-myFXiEh2Q

'Better performance' mode does a half-resolution decode on Red clips, so it's really working with 2K footage there. That said, Red footage playback is nuts without a RedRocket, with the required de-bayer and wavelet decompression. Even 2K decoding in real-time is impressive, and requires more horsepower than working with, say, 4K ProRes.

Also, Red currently has beta support for GPU-based decoding; once that makes it into FCP X you probably will be able to do real 4K in real time on that system.

Ah right. I don't use Final Cut, so I assumed Better Performance mode meant full resolution.

But either way, still impressive with all those effects loaded. I'd love to see how Avid Media Composer does.

 

[inhalexhale1]

cNet's Review

I'm not in the market for a Mac Pro (not the intended audience), but I think it's a cool product. I read this in cNet's review and it made me laugh. You guys have probably seen it, but just in case...

"The bad: Internal expandability is limited, and even the starting price is a hefty $3,000. While it's a very high-design product, the components inside are intended for professional use, and not especially suitable for Apple-loving home consumers."

I thought it was funny how "The Bad" is that a professional machine was made for professional use, and not "Apple Enthusiasts".

 

[Bazu]

cNET:
"The Mac Pro, as configured, was in most cases well faster than even the most high-end Windows desktop we've tested this year, but the non-consumer components created some problems for our standard tests. Our Photoshop test uses an older version of Photoshop, and it underperformed compared with our expectations, and is not currently included in the charts below. We're currently troubleshooting and re-running the test and will add those scores when we're confidant in them."

That photoshop bit starts to worry me. As PS is one of my main tools.

 

[goMac]

I'm not in the market for a Mac Pro (not the intended audience), but I think it's a cool product. I read this in cNet's review and it made me laugh. You guys have probably seen it, but just in case...

"The bad: Internal expandability is limited, and even the starting price is a hefty $3,000. While it's a very high-design product, the components inside are intended for professional use, and not especially suitable for Apple-loving home consumers."

I thought it was funny how "The Bad" is that a professional machine was made for professional use, and not "Apple Enthusiasts".

It's a change if you've been an Apple user for 10 years or more, although one people should have seen coming.

The original Power Mac G4/G3 and older was intended for both home and pro users, so if you've been around a while the pro tower being out of reach of a prosumer may feel different.

Since the G5, Apple has been really pushing the price and the speeds up and up to compete with the Windows workstation market and drawn the Mac tower out of the prosumer market. The 2009 Mac Pro really accelerated this, and the new Mac Pro is another step towards that.

When I was in high school I had a fairly high end Power Mac which was considered a "Mac" workstation, but definitely wasn't comparable to the sort of workstation Apple has turned the line into today, or the sort of high end pro workstations that were around in the day. For a high school student to have a new Mac Pro as their primary machine today, you'd have to be pretty well off.

 

[Gav Mack]

cNET:
"The Mac Pro, as configured, was in most cases well faster than even the most high-end Windows desktop we've tested this year, but the non-consumer components created some problems for our standard tests. Our Photoshop test uses an older version of Photoshop, and it underperformed compared with our expectations, and is not currently included in the charts below. We're currently troubleshooting and re-running the test and will add those scores when we're confidant in them."

That photoshop bit starts to worry me. As PS is one of my main tools.

FirePro woes by the sound of it and it's got to be CS6. If it's buggy on OSX and my first nMP customer is running it on bootcamp - bugger indeed

 

[goMac]

FirePro woes by the sound of it and it's got to be CS6. If it's buggy on OSX and my first nMP customer is running it on bootcamp - bugger indeed

Adobe, like a lot of other pro apps, has a white list of cards they'll allow for hardware acceleration. It means they always lag behind on new cards, or on cards they otherwise should work fine on. I wish they'd let you override and use OpenCL on a "non approved" card anyway.

 

[Spinland]

FirePro woes by the sound of it and it's got to be CS6. If it's buggy on OSX and my first nMP customer is running it on bootcamp - bugger indeed

I'm not sure they'd call CS6 an "older version," the only one more current is CC. I have CS6 and my Photoshop specifically supports OpenCL.

 

[Bazu]

FirePro woes by the sound of it and it's got to be CS6. If it's buggy on OSX and my first nMP customer is running it on bootcamp - bugger indeed

Well, for me if it happen to be real problem there I'am just gonna cancel my order. Not gonna spend 5000$ for something that won't simply work the way I need it.

I do also like to do some gaming in free of work time just to relax the way i like.
And 58FPS in Diablo III seems quite low as for D700. My order is for D500 so it will be like 40FPS?. So far it looks like Apple really overdid it in the "pro" way.

Not every pro is a Pixar employee and as I can speak for myself as graphic designer I like to do some gaming too. Would go for an iMac but I've seen those screens in the shop and those are not really good. Performing worse than my Eizo when it came to color reproduction (and my Eizo is not wide gamut).

Gonna be interesting weekend rethinking my decission based on reviews.

 

[Gav Mack]

Adobe, like a lot of other pro apps, has a white list of cards they'll allow for hardware acceleration. It means they always lag behind on new cards, or on cards they otherwise should work fine on. I wish they'd let you override and use OpenCL on a "non approved" card anyway.

Thankfully in Windows you can use a non approved card in CS simply by editing a few text files in the adobe programs folder. I white listed a gtx 650ti boost only earlier this week to work with it.

 

[goMac]

Thankfully in Windows you can use a non approved card in CS simply by editing a few text files in the adobe programs folder. I white listed a gtx 650ti boost only earlier this week to work with it.

You can on the Mac side as well. But that might not be review quality.

 

[Gav Mack]

Well, for me if it happen to be real problem there I'am just gonna cancel my order. Not gonna spend 5000$ for something that won't simply work the way I need it.

I do also like to do some gaming in free of work time just to relax the way i like.
And 58FPS in Diablo III seems quite low as for D700. My order is for D500 so it will be like 40FPS?. So far it looks like Apple really overdid it in the "pro" way.

Not every pro is a Pixar employee and as I can speak for myself as graphic designer I like to do some gaming too. Would go for an iMac but I've seen those screens in the shop and those are not really good. Performing worse than my Eizo when it came to color reproduction (and my Eizo is not wide gamut).

Gonna be interesting weekend rethinking my decission based on reviews.

I wouldn't make rash decisions and just wait, I'm sure they will bring out quick fixes but like any new product and platform with this being probably the most radical change since intel CPUs there are bound to be teething problems for the first few weeks.

Hopefully in my case the fact that AMD have had windows drivers going far longer than apple for their workstation cards means possibly less grief in the slightly longer term...

 

[Bazu]

Hopefully in my case the fact that AMD have had windows drivers going far longer than apple for their workstation cards means possibly less grief in the slightly longer term...

I just can't see myself using Windows. I've been on that road before. It didn't work.

 

[Gav Mack]

You can on the Mac side as well. But that might not be review quality.

I've never had do it on OSX cos none of my clients are Mac Pro hackers and upgraders and the hackintosh lot use supported cards by default!

 

[goMac]

I'd wait for a benchmark under Bootcamp before worrying. The 7950 is also having gaming performance problems on the Mac side under Mavericks, so it seems like the 7970 (which is the consumer twin of the D700) might be having some issues as well.

 

[Gav Mack]

I just can't see myself using Windows. I've been on that road before. It didn't work.

I've used both since 1988. Apart from the early 10.1/2 era which was painful Mac has always been miles ahead but that changed with Windows 7. Great at doing different things.

My clients for this want a compact windows workstation with twin 30 inch Dell's connected to their server domain and the can fits their requirements like a glove.

 

[koban4max]

I'm not in the market for a Mac Pro (not the intended audience), but I think it's a cool product. I read this in cNet's review and it made me laugh. You guys have probably seen it, but just in case...

"The bad: Internal expandability is limited, and even the starting price is a hefty $3,000. While it's a very high-design product, the components inside are intended for professional use, and not especially suitable for Apple-loving home consumers."

I thought it was funny how "The Bad" is that a professional machine was made for professional use, and not "Apple Enthusiasts".

cnet has a point...i don't see why it is funny. It is actually intended for professionals in certain field. Prosumers are the ones that actually to think and see if they are willing to buy it for that much...especially for quad core...which is not really good.

 

[Gav Mack]

I'd wait for a benchmark under Bootcamp before worrying. The 7950 is also having gaming performance problems on the Mac side under Mavericks, so it seems like the 7970 (which is the consumer twin of the D700) might be having some issues as well.

The windows workstation drivers for FirePro have had far more time in the wild debugging than OSX has. It's the PCIe/crossfire config which may be different that may cause the pain I reckon.

 

[goMac]

The windows workstation drivers for FirePro have had far more time in the wild debugging than OSX has. It's the PCIe/crossfire config which may be different that may cause the pain I reckon.

I've been told Crossfire should work fine. But that's entirely different than having verified Crossfire works fine.

 

[Gav Mack]

I've been told Crossfire should work fine. But that's entirely different than having verified Crossfire works fine.

Reckon its PCIe cos version 3.0 supports dual cards I'm sure of. Would be simplest and most efficient way though buggiest at first perhaps.

 

[elvisizer]

I've been told Crossfire should work fine. But that's entirely different than having verified Crossfire works fine.

yeah, I wish a reviewer would give us some details on what exactly we're getting with the dual GPU configuration on this machine under both os x and windows.

 

[Bazu]

New numbers here on page 2.

http://www.macworld.com/article/208...-speedster-weve-been-waiting-for-finally.html

 

[elvisizer]

heh, looks like FCP is the only thing that's actually running correctly on the hardware at this point- at least, that's about the only software using the GPUs that's showing the kind of results you'd expect. and it was just updated specifically for 4k and the mac pro's dual gpu's. can't be a coincidence.

 

[Bazu]

heh, looks like FCP is the only thing that's actually running correctly on the hardware at this point- at least, that's about the only software using the GPUs that's showing the kind of results you'd expect. and it was just updated specifically for 4k and the mac pro's dual gpu's. can't be a coincidence.

As far I'm happy for video editors they get perfect hardware for them. I'm still looking for something that shows wide use performance.
Photoshop, 3D graphics, gaming etc.

So far it only shines in video and some engineering apps.

Maybe apple missed with the name New Mac Video not Pro